Cultural exploration

My Chinese grandparents (Mama and Yehyeh) pretty much raised me while my parents went to work so I grew up eating a lot of Chinese food. Now that I'm older I don't really get to eat Chinese food all the time, except on weekends when I go home. Irvine has a huge asian population yet the Chinese food sucks and is a total ripoff. That's why I have proposed to several people to open an authentic and cheap restaurant, but that will probably never happen.  My conclusion to this problem is to learn to make all the different Chinese snacks and foods I enjoy. Cut to me a few weeks ago googling for recipes of Chinese cakes. In my quest for authentic recipes I found a woman on youtube who reminds me of my aunt. She makes all the Chinese foods that I love and she only speaks Cantonese which means she's legit. I started watching all her videos and translating some of the recipes to english for future use. Then 2 weeks ago I went on a crazy steaming binge and made 3 different desserts. I totally forgot to take pictures before devouring so I will post pictures when I make them for a second time, which is definitely going to happen in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I have finals next week so too bad.

The first dessert was "ma lai go" a yellow sponge cake. The taste was good but the texture wasn't right. I got the recipe from a Chinese woman speaking english so I probably should have expected the thing to turn out wrong. I'll try again using the youtube recipe from the dependable chinese auntie. 

The second dessert I made was  "leen go" a brown sugar jelly-like cake that you steam, dip in egg, and then fry in a pan. It came out perfectly. Once cooked it was nice and crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside. Perfection!

The third dessert I made was a coconut jelly-like cake. It's cooked the same away and eaten the same way as the leen go. My dad enjoyed this one the most.

This past Memorial Day weekend I decided to make "chung yao bang" or scallion pancakes. Note to self, don't put so many scallions in it next time. I had to add so much extra flour to accommodate the scallions moisture and collapse of my dough. Still everything came out perfect.